


bruises (on both my knees for you)

by antivenom



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Denial, Identity Reveal, Intercrural Sex, Justin Hammer is an idiot, Love/Hate, M/M, Miscommunication, Near Death Experiences, Oral Sex, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter is mean, Pining, Requited Unrequited Love, Stupidly Expensive Leather Couch, Wade is meaner, but so are wade and peter tbh, it's not miscommunication when you can't even admit it to yourself, that said:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-07-31 15:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20117068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antivenom/pseuds/antivenom
Summary: Peter wasn’t altogether convinced that Wade’s flirting had been anything more than a way to get underneath Spider-Man’s skin.Wade wasn’t altogether convinced that Spider-Man’s air of disdain wasn’t just a cover up because he was ashamed of returning the feelings.So, when Peter calls Wade’s bluff at the same time that Wade calls Peter’s, they both end up with their dicks in their hands. (No pun intended)(Okay, actually, it was definitely intended).Either way, nobody’s coming out of this unharmed.





	1. white shirt, now red (my bloody nose)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story told in afters— everything that physically happens (all the action in any sense) happens offscreen. I find the moments after to be way more interesting and I’m not particularly good at or interested in writing anything more than soft-core, hence the rating.  
The title is a lyric to Bad Guy by Billie Ellish which I’m ashamed to say the way this story happened was it hit me over the face after spending 1,000 hours sitting in traffic (think West Coast) and listening to the song bc the radio plays nothing else. Give the lyrics a listen because they are essentially This Story.  
As for the timeline and the characters, it’s vague, comics or movies, whatever spidey, whatever whatever whatever

Peter slumps back with a final cry, unaware that his back had arched that high. His shoulders hit the armrest of the couch with a dull thud as he struggles to get his breathing back under control. Wade follows him down, head lined with Peter’s, breathing equally as hard.

“Wow.” Wade says. Peter notes idly that he’s never heard him sound out of breath like this. Sex brings out weird intimacies, even if the sex itself wasn’t intimate. Oh God. Sex. With Wade. “Good work team.”

Peter realizes he has his fingers dug deeply into Wade’s bicep. He swallows and unpeels them one by one. He clenches them, trying to stop the tremble. With a weird amount of himself exposed (his mask exposing a flash of his jaw and his pants around his thighs) Peter feels stupid and ridiculous and wow—this had been a bad decision. Wade is warm above him, the same flashes of skin flaunting their damage, and Peter wishes they weren’t touching at all.

Peter closes his eyes against the image, sated, though a dull panic is starting to grow.

Meaningless sex is not something Peter has ever done. _Especially_ with Wade Wilson, a guy who thirty minutes ago had been arguing with him about whether or not Justin Hammer deserved to have his limbs removed. (He doesn’t, by the way. The guy is an idiot with an agenda, but that doesn’t mean they’re allowed to _render him limb from limb_, okay?)

In his twenty-five years on this bitch of an earth, Peter has had two partners. MJ, in high school, who had literally been way too cool for him and they both knew it, especially after the first few awkward times. And then Harry Osborn, in undergrad, which is another can of worms he’s not going to dive into, especially not right now, not when Wade is still rolling his hips in tiny little circles against Peter’s hip bone.

Wade’s had a crush on Spider-Man pretty much since the moment they’d met, and Peter had treated said crush with a weary disdain, which had only encouraged the feelings. They both know this, but Peter wasn’t all together convinced that Wade’s flirting had been anything more than a way to get underneath Spider-Man’s skin.

Apparently, Wade wasn't altogether convinced that Spider-Man’s air of disdain wasn't just a cover-up because he was ashamed of returning the feelings.

So Peter had called Wade’s bluff at the same time that Wade had called Peter’s, and they’d both ended up with their dicks in their hands. (No pun intended)(Okay, actually, it was definitely intended).

And now they went and fucked up (no pun intended, again) that easy balance that they’d had between head over heels and pure, unaltered hatred and Peter feels absolutely rawed, and not in a good way.

Because now Wade is under Peter's skin, and it's really obvious that Peter has enough feelings for Wade to sleep with him, at least.

He’s just chewing around a request for Wade to _get the fuck off_, when Wade presses a rough kiss to Peter’s jaw. He hadn’t rolled up his mask for the event and it wasn’t like kissing had any part in it either, so Peter gets to feel his lips for the first time through the blank spandex of his mask. Nevertheless, Peter feels it for what it was, a declaration of victory, a dethroning. _I got Spider-Man to fuck me_. Like a brag, or something uglier, something meaner.

Peter’s breath catches on the inhale—because what’s Wade going to do with this? What’s going to happen next?

Peter stops chewing on it. “Get the fuck off.” He says.

“Such a gentleman.” Wade husks into his jaw. He’s already moving, accepting the dismissal. He rolls back to his knee, one foot coming to the ground, legs swinging over, and then he’s walking away. In his absence, Peter feels cold and mostly gross and a little bereft, if he’s being honest. Which. He’s not. He’s not gonna indulge that feeling. It’s just the insanity of the decision he’d just made, nothing more.

With nothing better to do, he sits up, feeling the slight ache in his hip flexors and the pooling sweat at his lower back, but he ignores it in favor of making himself right again, pulling the mask down over his nose, tucking himself away, straightening his suit. It’s disgusting, because Peter had been the one with his back on the couch, and gravity works one way.

Meanwhile, Wade has done the same, but he’s also fixed himself a drink, now sitting at his own kitchen table, combing over a manila folder with the Hammer Industries logo stamped over it. His mask is down but the drink looks like something that needs to seep anyway: a splash of brown liquor and a huge piece of ice in a fancy crystal tumbler that seems out of place in Wade’s otherwise unappealing apartment.

Peter rubs his mouth, wishing idly to be rid of the mask if only so he could rip all his hair out, and stands up. It’s this movement that catches Wade’s attention. He looks up, briefly, and then back down again.

“Shower’s yours if you want it.” Wade offers. And then. “You probably need it.”

Peter’s expression sours beneath his mask. “Okay, Deadpool.”

“Whatever.” Wade snorts. “Don’t let the door hit ya.”

“I’m sorry, but are you seriously pissed off right now?”

“Just call me Bozo, because I’m a clown.” Deadpool says, fucking mysteriously. Peter wants to burst out laughing, from the way his chest feels uncomfortably full and the three shots of bourbon Deadpool has by his elbow and the fact that he’d just called himself a clown, and what the fuck does that even mean?

The bluff had been called and nobody walked away feeling good about it.

Peter opens his mouth. Closes it again. “Okay, Deadpool.” He says again.

And. Well. That’s their first time.

* * *

So.

Peter has maybe a tiny issue.

Or, not tiny, really. More like six feet two inches and 220 pounds of an issue, who likes to wear Santa Clause red and kills people. Well. He used to.

And if that wasn’t already enough, Peter’s made it worse for himself by _sleeping_ with his issues.

On a fundamental level, Spider-Man and Deadpool are two very, very differently people. They don’t even really like each other, not really. Sure, Wade is kinda stupidly cut. And, Peter now knows that Wade knows his way around a Stupidly Expensive Leather Couch, but _come on_.

Peter is thinking about this with his feet kicked up on the conference room table on the penultimate floor of Avengers Tower, glowering, arms crossed. They’re still working the case that brought them all together here in the first place—in that Justin Hammer is an idiot and said idiocy got brought to Wade’s attention who then brought it to Tony’s attention while Peter was in the room. Anyway, Hammer is trying to make a gas (spore? Poison?) that is able to be programmed (told? Controlled?) to target specific people (Tony Stark of Stark Industries?) by shutting down their lungs. Hammer was stupid enough to offer to pay Wade, a newly minted Avenger, to be the first one to try it out, which is why they’re all here.

So, long story short—because, really, when has Justin Hammer ever been the main problem, ever? —Tony had forced Wade and Peter to go over the information that Wade had been given. Three days ago, arguing over differences in the case had turned into arguing over pizza preferences had turned into some pretty fantastic mutual orgasming while horizontal on the couch, which had then turned into a curt dismissal and a bundle of hurt feelings.

Okay, well. They’re not actually hurt. He’s a full-ass adult and they’d both been consenting and panting for it. So maybe just, stung? Plucked, a little. Spider-Man isn’t strung out about this, nosiree.

“I have an actual day job, you know.” Peter insists, and Wade, across the table, perks.

“Ooh lemme guess.” He says, “Shoe shiner? Newspaper boy? Babysitter?”

Peter sits up, feet going to the floor, shoulders stiffening. “Are you trying to imply I’m a child?” He asks, deadpan, and Wade shuts the hell up.

Hm. That’s a new development.

“I know you have a day job.” Tony asserts, because Tony knows who Peter Parker is and Tony knows that Peter Parker is working toward his masters in a lab that Stark Industries funds. “But this is why I need you to work together. You keep Deadpool on task. Nobody else can.”

“I keep myself on task. Watch.” Deadpool replies, haughty. He turns back to Peter. “Bag boy? Video store clerk? The waiter at Olive Garden who tells you to say ‘when’”

“Not doing yourself any favors, DP.” Peter mutters, and Wade shuts up again.

Nice.

Tony watches this exchange with raised eyebrows. He turns back to Peter. “Find me something.” And then he gestures to the new stack of files piled at the center of the table.

Five hours later, Peter has combed through fifteen hundred lab hours’ worth of notebooks and Wade has made a comically large rubber band ball and done nothing else. Well, he’d babbled a bit, but that’s par for the course.

Peter shoves away from the table.

“I just think Mitch McConnel looks like a turkey.” Wade is saying. “Think about it. Think really hard about it. You know, Thanksgiving foods are all dry and heavy as fuck. Could benefit from some maple syrup or mustard or something.” Wade looks up. “I bet when you get fancy coffees you get extra whip. Extra _thwip_.” Deadpool chuckles.

“You’re insufferable.” He says, webbing the rubber band ball from Wade’s hand. It’s solid with a little bounce to it. Peter has to give it to him—making a rubber band ball is no easy feat.

“Don’t lie. I know you find me delectable.” Wade replies, lazy. “Also, hey!”

Peter flicks the ball out and back, like a yo-yo attached to a spiderweb. He swings it back toward Wade and retracts at the last second, before Wade can grab it. “Thwip.” He says, as the ball comes back.

“Extra thwip.” Wade reminds, and Peter actually smiles. Don’t tell anyone.

“Listen,” Wade continues, gesturing toward the files that Peter had left in a neat stack and pushed toward Deadpool. “You wanna have another study session?” He lowers his voice. “Call your mom, ask if you can sleep over.”

Peter feels kinda cold and hot at the same time, but ignores it. “I had a lapse in judgement.” He says. “Don’t expect it to happen again.”

“Okay, Spider-Man.” Wade says.

Peter grunts and then stalks from the room. He has a day job, sure, but he also has a night job, and he’s about to be late for his shift.

“It’s not happening again.” He finishes, winning the last word after all.

* * *

It happens again.

“Ah, fuck.” Peter says, head banging back against the brick. He hadn’t even been remotely turned on ten minutes ago, when Wade had unceremoniously dropped to his knees.

Wade, who is doing something very complicated with his mouth and Peter’s thigh and his hand to nurse him through the comedown, pops away and says. “Christ, you must never get it.”

“Shut up.” Peter replies, hips curling into the heat of Wade’s fingers of his own accord. “And take your fucking gloves off if you’re gonna touch me.”

“I’m not gonna do that.” Wade replies, keeping his fists where they are, his mouth closing over the soft skin at the joint of Peter’s hip and his inner thigh.

“You’re insufferable.” Peter says. It comes out wrong because he’s overstimulated and oversensitive and _Wade won’t stop touching him_. “Deadpool.” He threatens.

"You’re easy.” Wade returns, and Peter feels a swoop in his stomach, unpleasant. It ripples all the way up to the pit of his esophagus and sits there like an errant potato chip.

Because that’s what this is. They got off together in the Receiving area of a Hammer Industries factory upstate.

Christ, maybe he is easy.

This is time number two. They’re supposed to be breaking into this place, but instead of taking out the security guard they’re giving him a show. Peter lets Wade place open mouth kisses up his hips and wonders when it’ll be appropriate to kick him away.

He hadn’t asked for this…this after part. Not really. Like last time, he wants to ask Wade to give him some space, because it’s in those spaces that Peter finally feels shitty about this, where he finally gets hit with the emotions he deserves. Right now, he just feels a little antsy in anticipation of the hurt, and really fucking good. Like. Glowing. It’s a weird cross road of emotion—like, in five minutes he’s going to feel like absolute used garbage, but right now Wade is warm and willing and more than giving and Peter hasn’t been touched for way too long.

“Can you go again?” Wade asks.

“Fuck you, Deadpool.”

“I wasn’t aware we were gonna go that far.” Wade returns, and it’s not a joke, though it could be.

Peter’s head hits the brick again, sparks in his lower belly. This is the second time this evening he’s asked for consent. Both times have been under the guise of a joke, but it’s unmistakable, and last time Peter had given the same unmistakable yes under the guise of being irritated. Not this time, though.

What the hell are they doing?

“We’re not.” Peter insists. "We're not doing that." Even if they have sex again after this (which they won't, because Peter hates sleeping with him like this, and hates the gross feeling he gets afterward), it's not going to be penetrative.

Wade finally gets the message, and slumps back to his heels, wiping his mouth.

Peter inelegantly covers himself, clears his throat. And ah. There it is. That garbage fire feeling. Hello again.

* * *

They spend another day scoping out Hammer’s upstate factory. Wade brings Uno and a tactical radio and they sit and trade binoculars and play a million games of cards, making up new rules when it gets boring.

“I don’t know why you made this rule.” Peter says, from where he’s playing while standing on his head. He does a poor mimic of Wade’s gravelly voice. “’Every time you play a draw four you have to stand on your head, Spidey.’”

Wade laughs. “Blood in your head is good for ya.”

“Blood is always in the head.”

“Pee is stored in the balls.” Wade returns, and Peter flicks at card at him. It hits him right in the mask’s eye.

“Don’t be lewd.” Peter says, tucking in and rolling to his knees. He cracks his neck.

Wade shrugs. “Jus’ the way I’m written.” He replies, tossing his cards down to retune the tac radio and pick the binoculars up again. “Oh my god, Spidey, they’re having another _meeting_.”

“Seriously?”

“It is not as sexy as I thought it would be to be a Factory Lead. Not enough of that tune. You know.” Wade hums a few lines of the instrumentals they always play during manufacturing scenes in cartoons. “Oh God I think there’s a bar chart on this set of slides. Can’t we just blow this place up?”

Spider-Man replies, tiredly, “This stuff is toxic when inhaled, Deadpool.”

Wade lowers the binoculars and looks at Spider-Man for too long of a moment. “Ha. Good.” He says, finally. “Put me outta my misery.”

Peter reaches across him to the Costco package of extra cheese goldfish, curls his hand into a handful. “What about me?”

“Okay, fish for compliments much?” Wade nudges him, sending his handful of goldfish scattering across the roof.

“Was that a physical pun.” Peter deadpans.

Wade sends him a shit-eating grin. “You’re quite the catch.” He says, and something in Peter's chest lights up like sunrise.

They don’t have sex at all that day.

* * *

It all goes to shit. Of course it does.

Wade had been half-assing his part and Peter had been three-quarter assing his part and they were both too busy having sex (twice! Twice now! Oh good lord) and now Tony has a weird case of a biohazard induced pneumonia and Steve Rogers is waiting outside his quarantined room with his arms crossed.

“Um.” Spider-Man says when he approaches. “Is he awake?”

"Yes.” Steve says flatly.

Peter loves Cap, really, and from the amount of time he’s spent around Tony he’s also spent a lot of time around Cap. He knows a lot about Steve and both likes and respects him, but it never gets any less terrifying to be subjected to his wrath.

“You wanna tell me how this happened?” Steve asks. “How you missed five tons of this stuff while you and Deadpool were upstate?”

“Five, uh, tons?” Peter asks. Damn. There’s an edge of a current inside his mouth, a taste he hasn’t swallowed around since Ben died.

Wade had said, _hey, dare me to do something cool_ and then pinned Peter’s hips to the wall and now Tony is paying for it.

Steve sighs. His arms uncross and his hands go to the handle of the door. “Go home, Peter.” He says, and the dismissal stings twice as bad.

Peter doesn’t go home. He climbs three flights of stairs and calls Aunt May from the common room balcony. She doesn’t answer and Peter leaves a voicemail in a hollow voice.

Dusk is falling around the city, polluted air throwing vibrant colors as the sun screams its goodbye, and Peter wraps arms around himself and perches precariously on the railing, leaning outward, balancing in the wind.

He feels, rather than hears, when someone joins him on the deck.

“Having a pity party?” Deadpool asks. “Where’s all the balloons?”

Peter doesn’t acknowledge this.

“Come on. He’s going to live.”

At this, Peter turns. Wade looks even larger silhouetted as he is, arms crossed to makes his biceps bulge, the slight reflection of him in the bulletproof glass windows behind him looming.

Peter pivots, sliding himself down to stand leaning against the railing, arms crossed. “I don’t blame myself for this.” Though he does and this is a lie. But he wants Wade to hurt, because Wade never gets hurt. Wade wears his heart on his sleeve but somehow that heart is always whole.

And Peter has seen him angry and murderous and, quite frankly, scary, but he’s never seen Wade hurt. (Though he has, of course he has, he saw it with his own two eyes when Wade sat slumped at his own kitchen table with three shots of bourbon and Peter tried to pretend it all away on that damn couch). (The heart he wears on his sleeve is not his real heart—Peter would have seen it already if it was, and they’ve had sex twice and Peter still hasn’t seen it, despite all the flirting. The bluff got called, remember?)

“I blame you.” Peter replies. Wade, who has slept with him twice but still hasn't kissed him. Wade who has slept with him twice and Peter still only vaguely knows the fact that he had scars, has never actually seen them. 

“Takes two to tangle, mon cherry.” Wade butchers every aspect of the French and the idiom. It would be endearing, really, if Peter didn’t hate his guts and everything he stood for.

“No. You were a distraction.” Peter tells him. _Mon cheri. _My dear. Sweetheart. Honey. My love.

Wade crosses the chasm between them and cages Peter in, hunching down a little, hands tightening at the railing on either side of his hips. He leans in, too close, too warm in the fading light of September.

“Are you saying it was too good?” Wade whispers right into his ear, hot breath fanning over the skin there.

Peter uncrosses his arms, hooks his fingers into the straps on either side of Wade’s chest, and pushes himself onto his tiptoes to speak the next words directly over Wade’s lips. “Everything we’ve ever done together was a mistake.”

Wade’s hands come off the railing and around low on Peters hips. “That is a mixed signal.”

“Coming from you?” Peter asks, forcing Wade back a step, still in his personal bubble. Wade goes with the motion, hands sliding lower toward the swell of his ass. “What does this do for you?”

Another forced step back. Wade’s hands tighten, kneading a little. “We’ve had sex twice, baby, I think you know what you can do to me.”

Another step, hands harder. “What do you want from me?”

Wade closes the gap, nose to nose, lips touching through the mask. “I wanna know your name.” He says, and surprised, Peter forces him back one last step.

Wade’s back cracks hard against the bulletproof glass side of the tower, and within an instant a thousand tiny spiderwebs crack from the epicenter.

“Woah,” Wade says. He then coughs. “Ow.”

And Peter almost bursts apart.

In an instant, he is halfway across the balcony.

Oh God, oh god, what—what was he thinking? He stares at Wade for a moment and realizes he could have killed him with that action alone. This is unhealthy.

And altogether wrong, and somebody is going to end up worse than hurt.

“Oh God, Deadpool, I—” Peter starts, and with a wheeze Wade looks at him.

At the heat in his gaze, Peter is suddenly not halfway across the balcony, but instead over the railing, a web underneath him, and he is halfway across the _city_.

* * *

The middle of that very same night finds Spider-Man perched on the open window of Wade’s apartment.

Wade, who is not in uniform but still fully covered, who looks sleepy and comfortable but is surrounded in a hellscape of files. It's as close to guilt as a mercenary-turned-Avenger can get. Peter wants to cross the room and curl into him.

Wade looks up. “Look. I get we missed it. Messed up. Don’t have to shove me into anything else.”

It hurts, like it was supposed to. “I can’t stop thinking about it. Earlier. Today” Peter says instead. It’s not quite an apology, but it comes close enough for Wade to give Peter his full attention. “I really hate you sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah, I got that.” Wade replies, tossing a stack of folders to the floor. He must be sorting them. “Do you want to have sex?”

Peter just looks at him. “Look, I’m just—”

“Either get your dick out or get the fuck out.” Wade says. “That’s where I’m at right now, Spidey.”

Peter swallows. “I’m sorry.” He finally says, and Wade flinches

* * *

But it happens again.

If Peter had thought the first time on the Stupid Expensive Leather Couch lacked intimacy, then he’s not sure what to call this time. Part two starts rough and ends quicker; this time they’re not even facing each other. This time Wade gets himself off between Peter’s thighs and Peter is responsible for himself. It feels like Wade hardly touches him, hardly does anything but use him for the warm skin that he has.

“Next time I’m gonna...” Wade gasps, against the back of Peter’s neck. He bites, open and hard, like it’s punctuation.

Peter rolls his shoulders, getting the edges into the meat of Wade’s chest. They’ve never talked about it as a next time. They just let each other have each other in the moment. Peter wants to wipe his sweaty forehead against something, but it’s trapped inside his mask.

Peter, braced over that same armrest as before with all his weight (and Wade’s) in his elbows, grunts. It feels nice, in a weird way. He wants to slump into their wet spot and let Wade crush him. This is probably the longest contact they’ve ever had after sex.

He rolls his shoulders again, just for the contact, the warmth, and finds something hot and raw in his throat. Oh.

As Peter thinks on this, Wade moves around a little, shifting, withdrawing, but then there are lips sucking on his neck, soothing from the bite before. He jerks in response, back into the cradle of Wade’s hips.

“You want next time to be right now?” Wade rolls his hips in return, lips climbing up Peter’s throat.

Peter wants to turn his head and kiss him.

He surprises himself with his next words. “We can’t keep doing this.” It comes out low and wrong and filthy, but Peter has tears in his eyes.

“Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

Wade doesn’t move and Peter’s chest hitches, catches, like a rusty nail on skin. He squeezes his eyes shut and bites his lips closed and then Wade takes the weight off. The cold filters in.

But then, there are soft lips back on his neck. Not hard or painful. Just lips, a ghost of something.

“Oh for Chrissake.” Peter says, turning in Wade’s arms and kissing him, fully on the mouth. It’s a concession. An admission.

But Lord what an admission it is. Wade knows what he’s doing, kisses like he knows what he wants, knows when to moves his hands, when to dip in, to taste.

It doesn’t last nearly long enough. Wade breaks it to bite at Peter’s jaw and worm his hand down again. 

So if they end up going for time number three on the Stupid Expensive Leather Couch, then really, what’s the difference between two and three times? It brings the grand total up to four, and honesty, really, maybe Peter should just stop counting. At this point, he's taking what he's given.

When he gets home, he replays their first kiss over and over in his mind, and it scoops him out, gutted.

* * *

The next afternoon, Peter is in a hazmat suit in one of Tony’s personal labs trying to take apart what little they have sampled of the spores. He’s got it underneath a microscope, a couple of experiments in a centrifuge, and his concentration breaks when somebody taps on the glass.

He presses pause on his concentration, and the centrifuge still has a little to go, so he steps easily on the other side of decontamination and rids himself of the suit with a few easy steps. He ducks out of the lab as he pulls of his goggles, rubbing at the imprint on his skin.

Tony, looking a little ashen still but overall still no worse for wear, says, “Where are you at? You want me to kick this over to Banner for support?”

Peter is still rubbing at his nose. “No. Not yet. I have a bit of its chemical composition, not a whole lot. You ever heard of ChemDesigns?”

“Yes,” Comes a voice, and Peter is extremely startled (thanks _so much, _Spidey sense) to see Wade leaning against the far wall, arms crossed like he’s sulking.

Oh man, this is the guy he’d been sleeping with last night. And they don’t even know each other, not now, not in the light of day. They’ve had sex four whole times, and Wade doesn’t even know who Peter is.

He feels kinda dirty. Had Wade not slipped and mentioned he’d wanted to hear Peter’s name, then he’d probably feel even worse.

Small victories.

Tony smirks. “Peter, this is Deadpool.”

Peter stiffens, “Yeah, I know.”

“Pleasure to meet ya,” Deadpool says, and then smiles. “Are you lab grown? Didn’t know they had the tech to make somethin’ that cute.”

Peter smiles meanly at him. “Hatched, actually.”

“Fuckin’ hell, baby, I’d let you Alien me.”

“Um.” Tony says, and Peter remembers he’s still standing there. “Do you two know each other?” He asks, importantly. It would be easier to have this conversation as both Spider-Man and as Peter Parker, and maybe he’s already sleeping with Wade, but it’s not a good type of sleeping with each other. Wade isn’t a Bring Home to Aunt May.

They don’t even like each other.

Right? That’s definitely why Peter feels like such garbage about their arrangement. Its definitely because he _doesn’t_ like Wade Wilson.

Peter shakes his head, just as Wade asks, “Carnally? Would I ever!”

Peter wants to bite out an_ aren’t you sleeping with Spider-Man_ but he doesn’t, and it’s not like they’re exclusive. Or that they even like each other. And Peter Parker shouldn't know about all the carnal getting to know each other Deadpool and Spider-Man have been doing.

Nevertheless, he can’t help his response, directed at Wade. “Shucks, Mr. Stark, sounds like I can get a free meal outta this guy. Two if I'm lucky.”

“Parker.” Tony snaps, and Peter’s eyes snap to his. Tony gives him a _what the fuck_ look and oh. Yeah. This is weird.

Peter clears his throat. “ChemDesigns. They’re on Hammer’s payroll for his work in water purification. They also have government contracts. Records require a security clearance, but whatever this stuff is I’d consider domestic terrorism.”

“Like anthrax.”

“Yeah, so start there. I’m still working on more details.”

Wade cuts in. “How’d you know about payroll?” he asks. “That was in my files. Er, Spidey’s files.”

Peter shrugs, polishing the last vestige of steam from his goggles. Blasé, plain, he says, “Sometimes Spider-Man sleeps on my couch.” He winks, “He tells me things.”

“Parker.” Tony warns again, “Seriously?”

“Sorry, Mr. Stark.” Peter says, though he isn’t.

* * *

Wade seeks him out on patrol that night. He brings tacos, like a peace offering.

"Hot and fresh. Get em while they still have hot sauce."

Peter makes grabby hands. "Did you get mine with--"

"--Extra fajita veggies, yes, you fool." Wade throws a bag to him with an infinite amount of fondness.

"God bless America." Peter says.

"God save the Queen." Wade returns, reaching for tacos of his own, turning as he rolls up his mask.

"Listen," Wade starts. "Is there--"

Peter waits, trepidation mixing with something bright. Yes, Peter is not ashamed of the fact that this morning at the lab had been a test.

"Do you know what--"

It takes approximately five minutes for him to say, “I met your boyfriend today.”

Peter hums. “My who?”

“He’s cute.”

Peter throws back his last taco. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb. It’s unbecoming.”

Peter laughs. “I’ve known Peter for a long time.” Is all he says, and Peter can tell that Wade thinks he’s caught Spider-Man in a lie. He can see his face sour.

He doesn’t get the full reaction he wants though, because Wade is dragging him closer by the wrist, pulling hard until Peter bounces against his chest. He drops his lips to Peter’s, opens their mouths into a kiss that tastes like hot sauce and saliva. He tugs Peter’s lip with his teeth, and moves to the neck, the space he’d been sucking at last night.

“I’m on patrol.” Peter insists, but belays the words by twisting to get more of Wade’s mouth. He doesn't know how much longer he's going to get, and this is velvet smooth with a little tang, like a long pull of a good wine. God, Peter loves Wade's mouth.

Wade’s grip on Peter’s wrist is crushing. He kisses Spider-Man until they’re both too flushed and almost angry. Peter sinks into it, feeling heavy and light, something open in his chest.

And that's it. Wade leaves Peter there, staring after him.

* * *

When it’s over—when Wade’s finished—Peter feels used and ashamed and very, very vulnerable. Tears leak steady from the corners of his eyes, and his nose is suddenly stuffy and uncomfortable. His throat, raw, jagged, can barely swallow, a long line of saliva and come dripping down his chin. When Wade releases him, Spider-Man slumps, hitting the wall a little too hard, curling a little around himself.

It feels like Wade had just fucked the soul out of him.

Peter shuts his eyes. What would people think? What would people say? How would people use this knowledge, this image of Spider-Man giving particularly rough head on his knees in the semi-public?

He drags a gloved hand over his mouth, doing little more than smearing the wetness there. Above him, Wade says something that he doesn’t catch.

This...this is enough. Peter is ready to admit it.

He can’t do this for much longer. He can’t circle around this, can’t be stuck in this orbit. Because it makes him feel equally useless and used, makes him feel soupy and wanting more than this can give him.

If he’s being honest, which he rarely is, he’s tired of clinging to something he never really had in the first place.

Because Wade is huge and annoying and always there, but he’d been right about Spider-Man. Wade is loud and funny and stupidly smart and giving to the point of no return and has a huge heart that he tries to pretend is three sizes smaller, but most of all, Wade had been right. Spider-Man only acted put-upon and disdained because he had feelings for Deadpool.

And those feelings made him uncomfortable.

Still do, but on top of those uncomfortable feelings, now it just hurts.

And then Wade—frustrating, angry, content with the orbit—crouches down and fits a thumb into the hinge of Peter’s jaw. His mouth pops open with the pressure, a slight relief from the ache.

“Too much?” Wade asks, other hand fitting just underneath the mask and behind Peter’s ear. His eyes shut, and he manages to say nothing in response. Without his permission, his chest gives a pathetic sound. It's almost a whimper. “Yeah, too much.” Wade says softly, and swears. “Sorry. I'm sorry, Christ, Spidey you kept telling me you could handle it."

He could. He could handle it. He just can't anymore.

"Deadpool." Peter rasps, sounding very much like he'd just swallowed a box of nails.

"Yeah, Spidey." The thumb digs in a little better, and the pressure release could make Peter cry. "Tell me what you need.”

After a moment, Peter manages. “Isn’t this the part where one of us leaves?” He states, voice wrecked. It’s a fitting way to put words to something they’ve never spoken about, raw and cracked and ragged and frank.

“Can you even stand?” Wade asks, a little smug, but still fixed in this weirdly tender place, thumb rubbing a soothing circle at Peter’s jaw. Peter wants to crawl into the warmth and curl up around it, wants to fling his arms open and let the wave hit.

“That’s not what I was saying.” He returns, and there’s a darkness in his voice that he can’t pinpoint, an anger, maybe.

Wade’s hand stills, withdraws. “You were asking me to leave.”

Peter doesn’t respond. He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either. Instead he just tries to swallow again, against the taste of Wade in his throat.

Wade sighs, a picture of exhaustion. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Wade doesn’t call him on it. “Alright, then, Spidey.” He says, his voice off. “I’ll see you around.”

* * *

And then.

And then Wade gets shot and bleeds out on the back porch of ChemDesign in Jersey. Peter gets to him when he’s cool and pale but sill breathing, and Wade doesn’t die but it’s a close fucking bet. He lets Wade throw an arm around him and presses the button in the middle of Wade’s belt to teleport them back standing in the familiar center of Wade’s apartment, near the leather couch that they’ve had sex on three times now.

Wade makes a small noise, reaches up to his chest, and pops the bullets out.

Peter presses his face into Wade's chest and Wade's arms come around to squeeze the hell out of him, and against his temple Wade mutters, "Thank you."

And then.

And then the night ends on the center of Wade’s bed breaking more than one boundary they’d tacitly agreed never to break, when Peter steadies himself with a hand over the largest hole in Wade’s uniform and sinks down onto him, hand over skin.

And oh.

In the moments it takes to adjust before movement, Wade makes a wounded noise and sits up, hands coming around Peter’s back.

“I have feelings for you.” Peter says. The only way to fix this is with communication. Now that he can admit it to himself, he has to admit it to Wade. It had only taken three weeks of fucking to figure out.

“What?” Wade asks, distracted and pressing his hips upward in a test. It takes the breath right from Peter's chest, like he'd been hit with some of those spores and can't breathe any more around the closing of his throat.

“Deadpool.” Peter says. “I’m falling in love with you.”

"Don't." Wade replies, shifting. "Don't do this."

"The reason--" Peter hitches, begins again. "I keep telling you we can't do this anymore because it hurts me when we do it. And I realized it's because I want more."

"Don't do this." Wade says again.

"If you don't want more, I can deal with that." Peter whispers.

"Don't." Wade spits, "I can't."

It's like being kicked in the gut. "Okay, Deadpool." Peter says.

Wade doesn’t reply, just opens his mouth against Peter’s neck and fucks into him.

Peter clenches his hand over the hole in Wade’s suit and tucks his head against Wade’s, eyes shut, overwhelmed and uncomfortable, full to bursting with something denser than air.

* * *

It’s not enough

He lies there for a long time, alone between the sheets on Wade’s king bed, cold and still wearing his mask and most of his uniform. He thinks he gets it though. Because Wade is terrified. That part now is obvious. He’s scared because the flirting has always, _always_ been an unbidden defense mechanism, an errant desire. And Peter called him on it, and now Wade is too afraid to make it real.

Peter has been lying to himself about this for a long time. The disdain has always been fear of a magnetic attraction to a man broken enough to try to change, hanging on to that change, staying true to it.

They are more similar than they thought.

But none of it is enough.

Not enough of anything, because this time, this real first time, is hard and unforgiving and improper and it hurts underneath the constant thrum of heat. By the time Wade releases Peter’s hips and slips out to tie the condom off, Peter has tiny pinpricks of wetness in his lashes. It feels like an end.

It feels like being punished for a vulnerability.

Wade doesn’t return, and Peter limps home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> greats news is that this is finished but the bad news is that i can't promise when the second part goes up because i'm doing this newfangled thing called "actually reading and editing my own work"
> 
> \+ the song wade hums [here](https://youtu.be/qaC0vNLdLvY?t=80)  
\+ I know this is waaay less introspective than anything else I've ever written and sorry to those of u that expected that but mind u ...this was written in my head while in traffic, so it was a hell of a cathartic tool lmao  
+[ Check out this (NSFW) art that the evokes the titular scene.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16377944/chapters/47666446)


	2. (own me) i'll let you take control

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> +for all intents and purposes steve and tony are str8 (a wild concept)  
+why yes! I AM losing my mind. thanks for asking!

Peter gets ten hours to get over it.

Ten hours is clearly not enough, hardly enough to heal the bruising on either side of his hips. He gives up on sleep somewhere around the third hour of trying for it and goes into his lab early. He can’t really decide how he’s feeling, undulating between extremes like a sine wave. Anger. Hurt. Anger. Hurt.

At this hour, nobody is there at all, so Peter gets to roll up his sleeves and toss himself into his work. He doesn’t turn on any music, just pops his lab glasses on and gets to it. It’s almost nice, to do something for himself. He has three months until he’ll have his masters in biochemistry, a goal he’s been pursing for ten years now, something he decided concurrently with deciding to be Spidey.

Time goes too fast. Peter’s phone buzzes and when he checks it fifteen minutes later it’s a simple text from Tony, saying, “You’re late.”

It flusters the hell out of him—how did eight o’clock come so fast? He hadn’t had enough time to prepare himself for this. He almost forgets to pull on his mask and has to get out of the elevator to go back and find it. Luckily, Peter’s lab is in the Tower, so it’s just a matter of a couple tens of floors to get where he’s going.

After finding a private place to tug on the mask, he keys in his Avengers code to the private elevator (again) and rides it up, absently adjusting thick denim around the tender skin at his hips. He can feel his blood thundering in his throat.

“Come on Spidey.” Peter mutters to himself, and opens the door to the conference room. He soups on a confidence he wishes in his wildest dreams he had, and strides in.

“Sorry I’m late.” He announces to the room at large, and drops a thin folder in front of Tony Stark. He drops another in front of Steve Rogers, and then slides the last one across the table to Wade.

Wade stops the slide of the folder with his fingertips, assessing Peter with a raw darkness.

Wade smells like liquor and cigarettes. Peter undulates away from hurt. The anger sits fresh and untouched.

“Rough night, Deadpool?” Peter asks, with a tilt in his voice.

Wade’s hand flattens against the table.

“What is this?” Tony asks, from behind him, paging through the dossier.

“I got it from Peter yesterday.” Spider-Man says, turning, taking a few steps from Deadpool. It would still be way easier to clue Wade into the whole identity thing, but Wade can go play in traffic if he thinks Spider-Man is going to tell him now.

“So it is a spore. Organic.” Steve says. “Subcontracted for Hammer by ChemDesigns.”

“That’s not legal.” Tony says, removing the print-outs of the data and shaking them as he holds them up. “Helluva design though.”

“Attaches right to the proteins of the lung.” Peter replies. “This isn’t a very potent dose, but if we let them get any further with it, then we have a problem.”

“Virtually undetectable.” Tony murmurs, and pales. “Yikes. I don’t particularly want to be on the other side of this again.”

“You won’t have to.” Steve says in his Steve Voice. He turns to Wade, who hasn’t even opened the file yet. “Tell me if the two of you found anything last night.”

“We didn’t.” Wade states, blandly. He doesn’t elaborate. Tony shoots Peter a weird look.

Peter helpfully inputs. “Deadpool got himself shot.”

"Somebody didn’t do his homework on their security.” Wade returns, warm as you please, syrup sweet. This is the first thing Wade has said to Peter since he was inside him.

Peter colors, a little, under his mask. “At least I _did_ my homework.”

Wade grins. “Cute. Teacher’s pet.”

Peter turns on him. “I’m sorry, I suppose I forgot that you don’t care about the people whose lives depend on us stopping this.”

Wade looks at him. “Ah, stop, no, your sanctimony is turning me on.” He says, no tone, no interest, and Peter jerks away like he’s been physically slapped. It takes him all the way back to ten hours ago, to the smallness he felt sitting on the edge of Wade’s bed with his head in his hands.

“Is this funny to you?” Peter asks, and he’s not asking about the spores or Justin Hammer or anything in that dossier, but about the fifteen minutes that Peter waited while he still thought Wade was going to come back.

“Guys.” Steve is rubbing at his nose. “Seriously?”

Peter doesn’t look away. There is a tight little ball of wriggling heat in his throat. “He started it.”

Wade replies. “You finished it.” In a way that only Peter is supposed to understand.

Peter snaps, “We both finished, so don’t use that against me too.”

There is not an audible intake of breath, but Peter feels the attention of every person in that room.

It takes him a moment to figure out what he said.

In the space of that moment, Peter undulates all the way back away from anger. But it’s too late to retract the statement. The hot ball of heat crawls into this upper throat, fueled by shame and the acute sensation of loss, like maybe in the space of ten hours or whatever Peter had been ripped from something very valuable.

Wade is on the edge of his seat, like he’s going to stand up, breath shaking his chest up and down, his hand still flat against the table.

Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, two of the people Peter respects most in this world, are both staring at him, still. The silence is too long, and Peter can’t bear it anymore.

“Webs.” Wade begins, slow, and Peter jerks into motion, turning his back on all of them and pushing his way out of the room.

Door knob, push out, push back. Close. Swing a right down the hall, take a left, stab violently at the button to the elevator. Down down down.

He’s not quick enough.

Wade is behind him before he has a chance to escape, still smelling like that bar of his that he frequents.

“Was that not enough for you?” Peter demands of him in a whirl.

“Webs.” Wade just says.

Frustrated, desperate, Peter chokes, “What more do you want from me?”

Wade replies. “I don’t think we should do this anymore.” His voice is flat. Peter deflates like a crushed aluminum can.

“Fine. Great.” He says, voice too high. “Whatever you want.”

“Spider-Man.” Wade says, in a tone too dark, too open, like this endless repeat of Peter’s fucking name is at all useful to this conversation.

“I told you I could handle it if you didn’t want more. But you should know.” Peter says, “I don’t care how scared or stupid or pitying or horny you were last night. I don’t care how offput or uninterested or whatever you were but you. You.” Peter says. “Of all people. Do not get to treat me like I’m useless.”

The elevator dings behind him. Peter turns to get it in, and Wade doesn’t follow.

“’Of all people’” Wade quotes. Spit back at him, it sounds wrong. Peter can see how that particular phrasing could hit wrong. Like Wade, himself, was useless.

Peter adjusts his jeans around his hips again and says. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

He was trying to just say that Wade, of all the people in the world, the one guy that Peter trusted through the vulnerable moment, who wasn’t supposed to hang him out to dry.

“Do I?” Wade asks, around the sliding of the doors. They clang closed between them, and what takes Peter aback is not the two syllables nor the cadence, but how small Wade had looked, how hard his heart looked, there on his sleeve.

* * *

He’s taking a break from patrol for a late dinner on the wrong side of sunset, when Carol Danvers, of all people in the world, floats ethereally down toward where he’s perched on the edge of a rooftop.

“Hey Carol.” He says, as chipper as he can manage considering the day and the half of a sandwich in his mouth. Spider-Man brown bags it. It’s cheaper, okay. Plus, even his body couldn’t stand all the nitrates of a daily ‘dog.

“Hey Wall-Crawler.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be off world?” He’s thinking about how hard it would be to become a vegetarian considering his calorie requirements and his aversion to black beans, and Carol is rooting through his food stash, when he realizes. “Oh God.”

“Yup.”

Peter stares at her as she locates what she wants—his last Cosmic Brownie.

“Don’t tell me they—“

She grins at him, shit-eating. “Yup!” She cracks open his brownie. “So. Pipsqueak. Heard you had a sex scandal.”

He drops the rest of his sandwich on top of the reusable baggie he’d pulled it out of. “I didn’t.” He says with a heavy groan.

Carol speaks with her mouth full. “Well, Baby Gay.” She says, with the kind of gravitas that kind of statement absolutely requires, despite the fact that Peter is 24. “Try not to take it personally. Steve and Tony are clueless, but they love you. You know that. But they’re not big fans of _him_. They just figured I would be better equipped to talk you through this.”

“That’s humiliating.” Peter replies. “This isn’t even a scandal.” His face twists. “I just. Maybe had an outburst about it.” And then, “Tony has had a sex scandal before. More than one.”

Carol laughs. “Not a Big Gay One.”

“And you have?”

“Nope.” She pops the p. “But I’m your big strong lesbian protector, I guess. What happened?”

“I’m not talking about this.”

“Look. I’m gonna do you a huge favor that I absolutely expect you to repay me for in the near future and pretend like I don’t hate Wade Wilson, just so you can tell me.” She rambles. “What’d y’all do to each other?”

Peter picks at a thread on his gloves. “I’m not talking about this.” He says again. “I just—” And then, a little baffled. “I think I got broken up with today?”

“Oh.” Carol says. “Ouch.”

“I didn’t even—” his voice dies on the _do anything wrong_, because that’s not true, is it? He hasn’t been able to get the image of Wade as the elevator doors closed out of his mind all day. “I think I’m an idiot.”

“Oh, Labradoodle.” She says. “You are.”

Peter laughs, a watery sort of thing. “We both wanted different things from each other, and in the end, I think, neither of us got them.”

Carol stiffens. “Spidey.” She says, very, very seriously. “You would tell me if he took advantage of you, right?”

“He didn’t.”

“Sounds a little like he did.”

“He didn’t. I asked for more than he could give me.” Peter says. “He made it very clear that it was too much. That’s all that happened.” He takes a shuddery breath. “The stupidest thing about it is—is I told him that I. That I wanted…” Peter bites the inside of his cheek and feels rotten all the way from the inside out. “I don’t think he even believed me.”

The idea doesn’t even occur to him until after its vocalized.

Carol scoops an arm around his shoulders and he has to squeeze his eyes shut against the feel of it, of the strongest woman in the world attached to the gentlest of touch. She can hold planets in her fists, but instead curls her fingers around Peter’s shoulders, and that is enough.

“I’m gonna Venmo request you for that brownie.” Peter says, finally, and her fingers just squeeze a little harder.

* * *

Peter doesn’t see Wade again.

He thinks, idly, on the rough edges around what could be the worst panic of his entire life, that if Wade really did care for him, this is going to crush him.

Big if.

Oh well.

Peter is dying.

He’s dying surrounded and overwhelmed by Avengers in his ear, coming through the comms. He has no idea what’s happening, just that he can hear his heart beat behind his eyes, just that his teammates are fighting Doombots in Spanish Harlem and he’s dying.

He wants to take his mask off, but oh. It’s already off. It’s already off but he still can’t breathe, he still can’t get anything in. His mouth tastes moist and warm like rot, his nose full of it. It catches in his throat, and Peter is coughing, coughing, breath going out but not coming in. There is no one around.

He makes an alarmed grunt, like a cry for help. He hunches over himself. He can’t breathe. Oh god. He can’t breathe. His vision goes blurry.

“Falcon, close in 116th, now.” Cap shouts, beneath the clang of his shield.

“We’ve got more aerial.” Iron Man says.

"They don’t like katanas.” Wade offers.

“Go crazy.” Steve says, “Spider-Man, support.”

Spider-Man’s esophagus is closing.

“We’ve got a detachment climbing the buildings here.” Ping Ping. Bucky Barnes.

"Spider-Man!”

He’s making these desperate little hitching noises, squeaking at the end of them. His knees give, and suddenly he’s on his hands. His mouth gapes, air all around him but he _can’t breathe it in_.

“Where the hell is he?” Falcon questions.

He manages to get a shaky hand to his ear. Peter has been recently keeping his comms off unless he needs to talk, because otherwise people get mad when they hear his quips during the fight. For now though, he turns it back on and for a horrifying moment can’t manage any sound at all.

His vision is going sideways, face almost all the way in the concrete.

“Musta lost his comms.” Iron Man says.

“Idiot.” Barnes replies. Wade has been conspicuously quiet.

He’s going to die and none of them are going to know.

His mouth is gaping, wide open. He feels like he’s on the wrong side of a vacuum, and his chest is getting turned inside out, everything being sucked away.

Finally, he manages to scrape a breath in, and the sound it makes is too loud and horrifying, even to his own ears.

"Holy hell, what was that?” Falcon asks.

“It’s the kid.” Bucky replies.

“Spidey, what’s your position?” Tony asks, alarm growing in his voice.

Peter feels woozy. It kinda sucks. He doesn’t really want the others to hear him die. That same scrape of air screams through his lungs again. He can barely manage the breath, but for a second he gets it. He gets it and can’t manage to do anything productive with it.

What he does manage, which is frankly an embarrassing last word, what the fuck, is “Wade—”

And then, slicing through the darkness, comes, “I’m on my way.”

* * *

When he wakes, he chokes again, starts to panic.

He can’t speak and can’t breathe, and God, he really did die on the streets of Spanish Harlem, didn’t he? And the last thing he’d done was call out for fucking Deadpool, like some scorned lover, despite the fact that their last interaction had wrecked him.

But there’s a hand at his arms, someone with the same amount of strength to them, and a hushed mush of comfort noise.

“…just the ventilator, c’mon Peter, it’s me. It’s Steve. C’mon.” Cap is saying from near his left ear, stooped over the hospital bed and holding Peter by both wrists.

It takes a very short amount of time for the ventilator to get removed, and then Peter is sitting up, heaving, head in his hands, fingers through his hair.

“Mask.” He rasps.

“You took it off. We couldn’t find it again, not that it mattered.” Steve says, from where he’s now sitting in the chair next to Peter’s bed. It takes Peter a moment to realize he’s wearing a Hazmat suit, and so had Dr. Banner when they’d removed the vent from his throat. “Scared the hell outta us, Peter.”

In typical Cap fashion, he continues. “Three days.” Which is standard when you wake up in an Avengers hospital bed. Captain America tells you how long you’ve been out. “We had to beat your heart for you, for a while, until you started to heal on your own.”

“What—”

“I would recommend against talking, Mr. Parker.” Dr. Banner says through the intercom. He’s checking through Peter’s chart on the other side of the glass. “Your lungs are pretty impressively scarred. A dose like that should’ve killed you.”

Steve elaborates. “You got the full does of Hammer’s spores. I think he was trying to send a message. Scare us away until it’s ready for full production.” Steve says. “Didn’t do a great job. You were the only one hit. And Deadpool managed to, uh, get some information out of the guy who poisoned you.”

Peter closes his eyes. He feels like crying.

“It’s okay, Peter.” Steve says, a hundred degrees of warmth in his voice, and Peter doesn’t feel like fighting against the weight of them. “It’s over.”

* * *

He spends three days letting Aunt May baby him, ignoring the rest of the world, and then decides he has to get back into it.

Maybe that was a premature decision. Peter is thinking it definitely was while curled around the cool rim of his toilet, damp with sweat and out of breath. Apparently, the trip up the three flights of stairs to his apartment was too much for him. He definitely regrets leaving Aunt May’s.

Because now he’s burny and overexerted, blood at the corner of his lips, everything he’d eaten in the last fifteen hours on its way to the sewer. He presses his cheek into the cold porcelain and tries to breathe.

Every inhale is like a lungful of exhaust. He coughs, weakly, bloody mucus now the only thing coming out of his throat. He realizes he’s shuddering, too hot and freezing, like he has a mild fever. Banner had said to expect this as he healed, but he hadn’t thought it would be this bad.

Peter is not sure how long he sits there, but eventually his bathroom door creaks open. His Spidey senses don’t go off, though, quite frankly, he’d be glad to be put out of his misery.

He won’t be, not anytime soon, because a pair of sturdy dirty combat boots step through onto the laminate. Said boots are attached to two impressive calves and knees and quads, and Peter doesn’t look up further because that would require moving, and he’s tired.

“We can’t.” Peter rasps, “Not today.”

Wade moves, some sort of movement like crossing his arms that Peter can’t see because he won’t lift his head. “You seriously think that’s what I’m here for?” It’s not kind, not anywhere close to the sort of kindness Peter needs right now. “Tell me how you really feel, Webs.”

Peter pushes away from the toilet. If they’re going to do this, he’s going to take it sitting up.

“What else would you want from me?” Peter asks. “At least help me to bed. I don’t have as nice a couch as you.”

Wade recoils. “Peter.” He states, sort of a non-sequitur. Until Peter realizes that he’s not wearing his mask. This is the first time Wade’s seen him without his mask, isn’t it? Well. Second. Maybe even third. It’s weird how Peter measures their relationship in firsts. Firsts usually happen at the beginning.

“You found me out.”

“You were blue.” Wade replies tightly. “Your mask was already off.”

Oh. “Sorry.” He says. Something’s rising in his lungs. “Guess you caught me. I’m not my own boyfriend.”

Wade blanches. “That is also not why I’m here.”

He tries to clear his throat, but it feels like the soft walls of his esophagus stick together, slickly, for too long a moment.

“Not my smoothest move, I’m aware.” Peter replies, almost ignoring Wade.

“Nor was confessing your fuckin’ love to me when I was balls deep and shot up.”

Peter flinches. So they’re going there. Today. Right now.

He has a lot of responses, a rebuttal, an apology, but he almost just died and he can’t do this, not now, not on the bubbling edge of the bloody coughs he’s about to dissolve into.

So, he settles for, “You constantly surprise me with how low you can get.” He says, “Congrats, Deadpool, it’s a talent.”

Wade sucks in a breath, and Peter makes a horrible noise trying to press down the cough.

And the tide hits. Peter starts coughing around the healing scar tissue in his lungs, deep, raucous coughs that shake every bone in his body. Each one burns when it hits, right beneath his shoulder blades and underneath his ribs. They spring wetness to his eyes. He bumps up against that really sweet sort of desperation where Peter doesn’t know where the coughing ends and the panic attack begins.

Suffocating to death is _terrifying_. That was a lesson he never needed to learn.

The coughs continue to kick the breath out of his body again and again and again, until he’s leaning over the toilet throwing up stomach acid and blood clots.

When it’s over and Peter’s stomach cramps from the hurling and his throat aches from the acid and his lungs feel charred from the freakin’ _spores_, Peter is right back to where he started.

Exhausted, slumped damp and spent over his toilet.

He rolls his face into the arm curled around the rim. “I can’t do this right now.” His voice sounds the exact same fucked out as it had that night on the roof, many moons ago, when he’d hit his breaking point.

Wade mutters, “Now you know how I felt.” And then there’s a hand on the back of his neck, fingertips just in his hair. Peter wants to lean into Wade and let him swallow him whole, but his pain-addled mind, as it is wont to do, clicks straight to panic.

“No.” He pleads. “Please, I can’t today. Please.”

Wade immediately stops touching him, scrambling back like Peter had bitten him. “Peter.” Wade says, with an alarming amount of panic. “I wouldn’t.” He sounds horrified. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Peter stars coughing, panic and pain a feedback loop, but doesn’t produce anything more than a couple dry heaves.

“Okay, Pukebreath.” Wade asserts. “I’m not here for sex. But I am going to touch you.” A pause. “Is that okay?”

Peter’s back arches a little with the force it takes to breath in. He squeezes his eyes shut. Wow. This is pathetic. “Yeah.”

Velcro. Unstrap. Peter’s eyes fly open and Wade is _taking off his glove_. Then, that bare hand is up under Peter's shirt, on the dewy skin of his back. The surprise knocks a few more deep, dirty coughs from the darkest pits of his lungs as Wade paints broad circles with his palm across Peter’s back.

They sit like that for a long moment, Wade’s hand warm, its touch incongruent to the picture of the man in Peter’s head. Wade is not soft or quiet, yet for the five or so minutes that they sit there together, that hand is all the kindness Peter needs. He’s too tired to feel sorry for himself, and yet he still does, can taste his own self-pity the same way he can taste the charred tang of his own blood.

If only. Wade won’t even kiss him, and the two of them had done their fair share of fucking each other over. Literally. It’s too late for this softness, for this quietness. Peter wonders if Wade knows that. Maybe this is a concession. A goodbye.

Wade’s circles slow, hand moving over his ribs. “We’re going to move now.”

Oh lord. “No we’re not.” He wants to be stuck in this moment. He doesn’t want it to break.

“Yup. You can’t live in your bathroom.” Wade curls his hand, hot across his ribs, and Peter is on his feet. He is not proud of the way his hand immediately straps into Wade’s belt.

He’s still thinking about Wade’s hand, its dry fleshy feel, its strange topology, as he’s lead from the bathroom.

He’s thinking of that bare hand and how it feels, now. How Wade had refused to take the gloves off, even during prep. And then Peter’s thinking about being rolled onto his back, the way the bruises on his hips had purpled right around the imprint of the line that spans Wade’s gloves at each finger just below the first knuckle. How they’d fucked through two uniforms and two masks and Wade had left him there alone and uncovered and split open, just for _daring_ to ask for more.

Peter squeezes his eyes shut, breathes, and wonders what the hell Wade is doing here, and why he’s not going for the clean break. They narrowly avoided combusting; the _I don’t think we should do this anymore_ in front of the elevators should have been enough. These slow circles at his back, soft scrape of nails, the ragged wheeze of his voice, Wade’s bare hand—all of it, nothing more than a beautiful cruelty.

He steps away from him, now. “I can walk.” Peter says, grabbing Wade by the bare wrist, removing it from his skin. 

“Okay, but—” Wade steps back toward him.

“Stop it.” It’s turning into a struggle.

“What are you—”

“I can do it.”

“You literally look six inches from death. Let me just--”

Peter twists Wade’s arm by the wrist, and shoves him backward. Hard. Wade jerks back a few steps.

Wade heaves in a breath. “Are we doing this now?”

“Yeah.” Peter rasps. “Yeah, we’re doing this now.” He says. “What are you doing here, Deadpool?” Peter says. “I thought you said we weren’t doing this anymore.”

Wade doesn’t rise to meet the energy in Peter’s tone. Instead, he clucks his tongue. “You know.” Wade says, knocking his bare hand against the wall, knuckles making a dull sound. “You never call me by my name? You know it, don’t you? It’s not a secret.”

Peter doesn’t reply. He thinks and can’t remember calling him either Wade or Deadpool. He calls him Wade in his head.

“Yeah. So. Suspend your disbelief, people. I’m a little slow on the uptake when it comes to your every whim.” Wade says. “Especially when they’re super hard for me to believe. Or, you know, after a traumatic incident. Or in the middle of sex.”

Peter blanches. “I wasn’t. I wasn’t trying to manipulate you.”

“Me? Of all people?” Wade laughs, an echo of the last conversation they'd had. “Why would I think any differently? You act like you barely tolerate me, and then out of nowhere you’re hurt because I’m not giving you enough of me? Like something as simple as falling in love with me is that fucking easy?”

“Wade.” Peter scrapes. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“And he does know it.” Wade says. “Gold star for the day.”

"You had almost _died_.” Peter coughs, ignoring Wade’s deflection. “I wasn’t manipulating you.”

Wade turns, looks away. “I never thought you’d take me seriously.” He says, with a self-deprecating little snort. “The idea of you wanting more—"

“You weren’t being serious. You just wanted to get under my skin.” Peter replies.

“Not at first.” Wade says.

“And then?” Peter presses.

Wade just stares at him for a long moment. Peter becomes aware that he’s breathing hard, that his heart is beating too warm.

“I wasn’t manipulating you. You had almost died.” Peter repeats. “That’s the textbook perfect time to be honest. I mean, come on DP, haven’t you ever seen a romcom?”

"I have.” Wade says, two words, and the parallels of their reality hit like two sharp pieces of glass.

“Oh.” Peter says. “I just almost died.”

Wade jerks, but doesn’t break the eye contact. And. Wade is scared. That part is obvious.

Peter coughs once, twice. “Guess I know why you’re here.” He’s coughing harder, now, as he pads to the sink to lean over it. As they slow, he heaves, spitting out blood.

“Little slow on the uptake, buddy.” Wade crosses the room to get that bare hand on him again, slow circles on his back.

* * *

A week and a half later, Peter wakes up on the Stupidly Expensive Leather Couch, eyes swimming, mouth tacky. He’s not wearing his shooters or his watch (or his shirt or his mask, fuck). So he has no idea what time it is, but he’s pretty sure he’s still drunk.

Judging by the indigo color of the room, it is sometime in the waning hour before dawn. He’s supposed to have brunch with Aunt May this morning, so that gives him roughly five hours to sober up.

His personal life might be a mess, but at least he keeps a schedule.

Sorry, no time for a mental breakdown today, but can I pencil you in for next week?

Peter is still drunk but not the good kind of drunk, not anymore. Not even drunk _enough_, he thinks, as shame wracks a shiver through the new meat of his lungs. They hadn’t had sex last night, but that doesn’t stop the mainline of worry going through his brain. With a thumb, he presses into a hot spot on his ribs that’s on its way to Bruise Town, Population Sixteen.

The worst part about this is not the drunk makeout they’d had, nor the sneaking off between mingling at the party like it wasn’t totally obvious what they were sneaking off to do, or Tony giving him the stink-eye, not even the stumbling into Wade’s apartment together and heading straight for the couch to continue until they’d both decided they were too drunk for anything more. That’s not the worst part.

The worst part is waking up alone.

He sits up, fighting down a terrible case of the spins, and buries his face into the butter-smooth back of the couch. Against the cool leather, Peter’s lips feel swollen. Just a few weeks ago he’d been hurting just trying to savor the rare moments where Wade kissed him, but last night he’d given into it like it didn’t even matter, and it had stripped all the meaning from it. Now, it just makes his mouth hurt.

Last week when Peter was recovering from the attempted murder (good god) was a step in the right direction for them, at least back toward the friendship they’d had before that fateful night on this very couch, but this seems like a giant step back in the wrong one. They hadn’t had any conversation about _this_ past Wade’s little non-admission in Peter’s apartment. Peter spares a moment to wonder why the hell they just can’t seem to stop orbiting each other, why the escape velocity is too high, why they keep bouncing together like two ends of a stretched spring.

Stupid. This is stupid.

Carol is going to be so mad at him.

He breathes against the leather. Stupid. Last night had been like a dream, like they were young and giggly and full of possibilities with each other, like maybe this was the real way their relationship was supposed to start, the honest way. Drunk people, after all, are honest. And isn’t that how this whole thing started? Peter wasn’t honest with Wade or with himself, and Wade wouldn’t know emotional honesty if it climbed onto his lap and said _I have feelings for you_.

Peter feels dirty, like Thor’s mead had mangled them into two people who didn’t know the actual truth about their relationship. Drunk them were just two people, two strangers, falling in love. An honest, genuine type of thing.

He swallows around his cotton mouth and peels himself from the SELC, taking his time in standing up. Yeah. He’s definitely still drunk.

He rounds to the kitchen to duck his head under the sink, ignoring the dishes in it, and drinks straight from the tap until he gags, spitting water and narrowly avoiding losing everything he’d drank last night, too.

“Oh my god.” He should probably leave Wade’s apartment—the being alone thing is still, like last time, a pretty good indicator that he’s not wanted. But, he braces himself around the sink as his stomach rolls over itself and his heavy head spins. “I think I’m going to die.”

“Mood.” Wade says, from behind him.

Peter jumps, jerking around (oh holy god what a bad decision; he’s definitely not getting through this morning without throwing up).

“I fell asleep on the bathroom floor, can you believe that? I think I might have actually died.” He says, deftly moving around Peter. His bare (bare!) hand drags across Peter’s lower back as he goes.

Peter watches him dumbly as he opens up a cabinet and pulls out a chipped old mug.

Peter must look like a wreck: covered in smarting red hickeys, lips swollen, water dripping down his chest from his chin, frozen there in shock.

“Coffee?” Wade asks, pulling down a second mug. “Or are you gonna spew?”

“Not gonna.” Peter hiccups, sways. He’s not entirely sure what’s going on right now, just that the whole world is spinning at a very low RPM.

“Oh.” Wade says, not without a hint of glee. “Still drunk?”

Peter feels his face twist. The drunk he’s at is the wrong side, where he feels cold standing two feet away. Wade feels very far away. It’s the same exact feeling he’d gotten every time they’d had sex, as if he was looking at something unattainable through an entire block of ice.

Peter breathes out a long breath.

“Wade.” He says, his voice wobbling despite his every effort to keep it level. “I would like to be sober now.”

He is absolutely flummoxed as to how much vulnerability slurs into his voice. Like churning butter and bringing up something unpleasant in the cream, it occurs to Peter very distantly that he’s never let the soft side show. All the time’s he’s felt it he’s always deflected away with something disdainful or angry or accusatory.

But now, today, after waking up alone and then discovering he’s wasn’t actually alone, he can’t stop it from sliding through.

Wade pauses, there in his kitchen, and his arm twitches.

Peter thinks about that first time, that _get the fuck off_. He’s thinking _you were asking me to leave_ and _stop it_ and _take your fucking gloves off_.

“Oh,” Peter breathes, and steps into him. He balls his hands into Wade’s uniform at his sides, head on Wade’s clavicle, and holds on.

It’s a little like stepping into freefall.

For a long, long moment, Wade stands there, arms agape, and doesn’t even twitch.

Eventually, eventually, Wade’s bare hands smooth up Peter’s arms and around him, and Wade holds on just the same.

* * *

With one last hit, the last bad guy goes down.

“Hell to the yeah!” Wade says, giddy. “My kinda science!”

Peter, still dangling from the top of the fumehood, says, “The only difference between science and screwing around is writing stuff down.”

“Well, Adam.” Wade tosses a Bunsen burner right into the ChemDesign logo on the labcoat of a goon who’d been waking. He lets off one last ‘oof’ and falls quiet. “Not only did we kick ass, but we also took names.”

Peter swings down to stand on the ledge of the hood. “According to my calculations…it counts.” It’s a bad response, a terrible response, but he can’t help the grin. “I can’t believe we finally got them.” His heart is thundering in his ears, chest feeling like it’s bursting full of feathers. “We did it, Wade.”

"Fuck you Justin Hammer!" Wade skids over the top of a lab bench, opening his arms wide, sending a couple dozen pipettes to the floor. They burst on impact. “Take a sip, babe, of that fresh, sporeless air.”

Peter darts from the fumehood to the glassware cabinet, hanging with one hand curled over the top and one foot on a shelf. The other two limbs dangle, swinging in an arc. "I love to breathe." He says.

“Oh man.” Wade approaches. “Are there any more of these dudes to punch? I could fight a thousand armies right now.”

“Well,” Peter replies, pressing his free foot into Wade’s hip. “It looks like you just missed ‘em.”

Before Peter can really get a hold of what’s happening, Wade has yanked him by said foot, gotten an arm around his ass and he’s releasing from the shelving and spinning into Wade’s arms. Momentum has him impacting hard against him, but Wade can bench more than Peter weighs so there’s not careening, just a slowing, a stopping.

They’re both breathing hard and way, way too close.

“Oh man, Spidey.” Wade breathes as Peter hooks his hand around Wade’s neck and hooks his heels to his spine. Wade starts walking, into the now-empty office.

He smooths a hand up the outside of Peter’s right thigh. “What a good fight.”

Peter’s thumbs hook into the bottom of Wade’s mask.

“The best.” He says.

He’s still awake with adrenaline like a drug pounding through his veins. He can hear Wade’s thunderous heartbeat, and the both of them are sweaty and worked-up, the post-battle high still pulsing all around them.

A few things happen in short succession. Wade very inelegantly grasps Peter’s mask at the top of his head and tugs it off, pulling at his hair.

Peter hooks his thumbs into Wade’s mask and pulls it up to the nose.

Wade digs his teeth into the Velcro of his glove and unstraps it, pulling it off. He adjusts Peter like a belt across his hips and.

And Peter kisses him.

Wade kisses like he fights, wild, all over the place, dirty. There’s an electricity between them, humming beneath Peter’s skin, singing and bright as Wade tugs bare fingers through Peter’s hair and Peter cups his jaw. Wade tilts his head, withdrawing until they’re simply panting into each other’s mouths.

“You sure?” Wade asks. “We don’t get to take this one back. This one counts.”

“What’s that mean?” Peter hitches.

“Neither of us are very good at this. But there is a this. You get that?”

Peter just grins. “Was this a date, Wade Wilson?” He says, rubbing his thumb down a white streak of a scar on Wade’s jaw.

“Gross.” Wade says. “But we’re a helluva team-up. And that was the most badass fight. _Better_ than badass."

Peter thinks about this for a moment. “Better than sex.”

Wade’s lips (and teeth and skin and mouth) quirk into a lopsided smile. Genuine. “Yeah?”

Peter hooks his hands around Wade’s skull. “Call my bluff.” He says.

And. Well. Maybe this is the first time that counts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> +this is a story told in afters, but there is one (and only one) scene told as a before, which is the very last scene. See what I did there. This bitch be endin the way it starts  
+every fic like this ends with “and they lived happily ever after” but I wanted a more ambiguous, but still just as happy, ending. They still got shit to sort out. And they will. Eventually.  
+I would love to lend my prose to that buckwild kinda fanfiction but I spent many moons in a sheltered home and God is Watching. Also I’m baby.  
+that said, I’ve been on the wrong side of the kind of chat Carol and Peter had…..it ain’t college until you hook up with a guy named kyle whom you never met. God Was Watching then, too.  
+kyle if you’re reading this heyyy haha wyd


End file.
